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My dad just contacted me mentioning that he could not receive emails on his work address. I recently set up the company (I don't actually work there, I just help him with his IT) with Google Apps emails. After doing a bit of digging I find an error int he control panel that says "This user has been suspended for abuse".

The help files say to log in as a super admin and click a button that says "restore user" but no such button exists for me (I'm the only super admin).

Now my dad can't receive emails and all sales inquiries and everything company related go directly to him. This is a huge problem and Google support doesn't seem to exist. I made a post in the product forums but it hasn't helped at all.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

EDIT: Upgraded to Google Enterprise for 30 day trial and was able to call and have them get it resolved. Will look into Chrisma08's suggestion about setting up separate MX records for my dad tomorrow. Narzy also has a good link and suggestion about quoting "P2" to determine this being a high priority issue. Thanks for your help everyone!

Maybe he wasn't, but if he's connecting to the account with a desktop email client (Outlook, Thunderbird) and has a virus or some malware that could be using his account without his knowledge, then that could get him pinged by Google. So that's something to consider.

This page will let you get in contact with support. Log out of all other google accounts then log in on the administrator account for your business and visit that page. In your support request tell them it is a P2 - High Impact issue.

The point is that you pay to get support. If you need some sort of business critical infrastructure or service, you should pay for the business version. It is the same thing with ISPs. People call up during an outage and claim that they need their service restored right now since they use it for business, but don't understand why they should upgrade to the business package with better SLAs and escalation. If something is important enough to you, you should pay the higher cost involved.

I thought google business apps pricing was quite reasonable $5 a month per user here.

I have had a two separate experiments of making functioning businesses for little or no money by using only free resources on the Internet. The only thing I have had to pay for is a Domain name (yes I would have used a free domain name but I wanted a .com) and some fees in Paypal.

Everything else I managed to get completely for free. I found it a good experience.

Having said that, if I had thought about running a proper going concern there is no way I would being relying on free services

We were hosting our own domain through a company called Infinity Web Services. My mom and dad (who have been the only company employees for over 20 years) just logged in through gmail directly. I had routed their domain emails to work through their standard gmail accounts. This worked just fine as it was just the two of them.

Recently though they have hired their first ever employees so logging in directly through regular gmail.com email addresses was no longer an option so I set up a Google Apps account. I've never done this before, I'm in marketing - not IT and my web knowledge is better than average but not actual IT level. All was working fine until today when my dad contacted me with this.

I would like to just delete my dads email from Google Apps and let him carry on the standard way. The problem is I can't even delete his email from Google Apps until it's "unsuspended" which I can't seem to do.

What you can do is revert the MX records back to the domain host/registrar. You'd need to setup email accounts for all your current users. You can then forward emails from those account to the back-end Google Apps addresses for the still active users (<username>@<domainname.test-google-a.com), assuming those are still active. Then all users but your Dad can access email through Google Apps, but you'd have your Dad connect directly to the domain email account.

It's kind of a hassle, frankly, but Google is not known for moving quickly to correct these kinds of situations, so you might be waiting a couple of weeks.

Thanks for the suggestion! That's probably what I'll end up doing. The whole reason for using Google Apps is password control over external employees but with my dad that's not an issue since it's his company. It's what we were doing before Google Apps anyway so it's not really a problem to convert him back.

You'll still have some down time while the MX records propagate back to the host account (at least for your Dad; everyone else should be fine as long as you setup the domain email accounts and fowarding first).

If your test-google-a.com addresses aren't showing anymore, it looks like you can re-enable them from the Admin Control panel under Domain Settings>Domain Names.

I would just let Google know, this must have happened as an accident. Your dad's account was probably detected as spam. It has happened to me once before, they emailed me back and opened my account back up.

You're right. But I also think Google needs to get off their high horse and actually start acting civil towards it's customers. Cutting off access completely to a user's e-mail account? That's nonsense.

I've read a couple of different stories where Google has done this same thing, and it's just not right when everybody is increasingly storing more of their lives in the "cloud". Yes, they shouldn't trust everything to the cloud, but they do, and with good reason.

Amazon did the same thing with e-books. I'm sure there are similar stories of other providers of "electronic goods you don't actually own but we're going to pretend you do" doing the same. Ultimately, the onus is on the sysadmin to decide, wisely, what needs s/he is going to have taken care of by outside sources that are not under his/her immediate control.

You can bitch about how unfair it was of google, and yes, it was unfair. But the fact is that it was stupid to leave something that mission-critical in their hands in the first place.

Oh, the issue isn't Google protecting themselves from spammers. It's Google preventing a user access to their account (which I agree, they don't "own") without a decent explanation, or time to remedy the situation. I think Google would be better to put an account on "probation" (for lack of a better word), notifying the user, and give them time to fix it.

I think OP has said elsewhere that there's no way his dad was sending spam, intentional or unintentional. If his dad was sending large amounts of spam, then they have every right to temporarily disable his account. But that doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Be sure to check all computers that use the mail service for viruses and malware, and make sure they have updated anti-virus progams and regular scheduled scans (Microsoft Security Essentials has worked great for me, and it's free).

I had this happen to a high volume gmail user @ my workplace. (I am the Network Admin / Computer guy).

We have GMail for Business ($50 an account). I put in a help ticket and it took 2 days for them to call me. The tech (who was from the United States) resolved the problem within 5 minutes. She was very nice. __^

I had a client who repeatedly got shut down for abuse with Google Apps by sending too many emails via OutLook. They were one-to-conversations, but Google had a limit of 100 SMTP relays per day and he was definitely exceeded this. I think the paid service increased it to something like 500, which solved his problem.

Sure. Contact Google and tell them that if they don't restore the account immediately, you'll contact Microsoft and help them out with their commercials. Microsoft right now is campaigning against Google cloud products, and this is a very good reason.

You can pay for Google Apps too and then it does come with phone support. We use it at the company I actually work for and it works just fine (along with our domain hosting). I have a feeling we're just going to have to upgrade Google Apps to paid...

I've watched over dead friends being buried with that same long salute, I appreciate its value.

I find this amusing. I sympathize with your father's problems, not enough karma. Veteran's Day and not a post I can find. I attended a good friend's burial with a long salute. Joe Henson, I'd have helped ya if I could.

Servers have logins. Username and password combination to access admin privs. How do you fix someone doesn't like you today? Have more money than them, my closest guess. Bribe the guy who runs the server is my best guess.